


Experts

by weakinteraction



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M, Starfleet Academy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-08 13:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14106324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Beverly is trying to unwind after a long day at work at Starfleet Academy.  Jean-Luc is still marking.





	Experts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



"Hmmph," Jean-Luc said.

"Problem?" Beverly asked mildly, not catching his eye.

"Cadet Bracewell has constructed an argument out of nothing but unsubstantiated assertions, wild speculation and, and... outright non sequiturs."

"Cadet Bracewell in second year?"

"Do you know of any other Cadet Bracewells?" Jean-Luc asked. He put down his PADD and looked at her with deadly seriousness. "Please tell me there's not some whole family, each more lacking in academic rigour than the one before, but all with a burning ambition to join Starfleet."

Beverly crossed to the replicator, tapping it to dispense a cup of tea without giving a verbal instruction. "Cadet Bracewell was one of the top in her class on the simulation component of my emergency response course last year."

"Well, perhaps she's more suited to the practical side of things, but this essay--"

"That essay was put together in one evening just before the final upload deadline, and you know it."

"I'm sure she had a very good excuse."

"Well, everyone knows how distracting the presence of a Deltan can be." The new first year, Aixa, had turned many heads.

Jean-Luc raised an eyebrow, then cleared his throat. "Well, yes, longstanding Academy -- and Starfleet -- policy is to accept that habituation to Deltan pheromonal signals takes some time, and that it's unfair on our Deltan colleagues to avoid them while that process takes place... Still, I expect the cadets in my class to be able to pay attention to their studies as well as..."

"I think you should count yourself lucky you received any sort of submission from Cadet Bracewell. I happen to know that she is becoming very habituated indeed," Beverly said. "Her attention was reciprocated."

Jean-Luc's eyebrow crept further up his forehead. "Idle gossip," he muttered.

"You're lucky you've got me around to let you know what's really going on," Beverly said. "Don't you remember what it was like?" she went on. "Being an infatuated young cadet?"

"All too well," he said stiffly.

And there it was, all over again: the one thing that bound them together more than any other, the one thing that always stood between them too. Jack.

Beverly decided it would be best to change the subject. "Admiral Laris came by today. She showed me a very _interesting_ set of schematics," she said.

"Oh?" Jean-Luc was trying to sound mildly annoyed at her distracting him from his marking, but the look in his eyes was relief at not having to acknowledge the Tarellian Pachyderm in their quarters.

"The first designs for a new generation of vessels designed purely for relief work and medical emergencies."

"Oh," Jean-Luc said. Then he suddenly became animated. "Did it have a large spherical forward section, by any chance?"

Beverly flashed her PADD at him. "Is this what the _Pasteur_ looked like?"

Jean-Luc took the PADD and squinted at it. "Some variations, but nothing you wouldn't expect between the drawing board and the real thing."

As he passed it back to her, she saw that his expression had become grave. "Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "We have to expect some correspondences between that timeline and our real one. But there have also been significant deviations. You told us that Will was commanding a refitted Enterprise-D, and the Enterprise-D crash landed on Veridian III." There were other differences too: despite the fact that they had been living together for years now, Jean-Luc had stubbornly refused to get married. If they didn't get married, they couldn't end up divorced, seemed to be his logic. "It was all just a particularly elaborate one of Q's tricks."

"Do you know," Jean-Luc said, "I still worry sometimes that I'm going to turn up to give a seminar and sitting there at the back of the class will be an extra student slouched at the back making sarcastic comments about humanity's inadequacy in the face of 'what's out there'."

Beverly laughed. "You're thinking too small. You'd get there and find him already there, setting himself up as your substitute."

"As long as he didn't click his fingers and take everyone on a field trip to the Andromeda Galaxy," Jean-Luc said. But despite his jocular tone, she could tell he was still troubled.

Beverly took the tea out of his hands and slid onto his lap. "Listen to me," she said, and kissed him. "You are _not_ that Jean-Luc. And I am not that Beverly. We don't have to end up like they did. We _won't_ , if I have anything to do with it." And she kissed him again, long and deep; he reciprocated, his fingers tangling in her hair as he pulled her closer.

"Anyway, I really must get on with this marking," Jean-Luc said after they finally broke apart.

Beverly stood up again. "You know, you could spare yourself reading all these bad essays if you let the expert system mark them."

"There is a 5% discrepancy rate between the marks awarded by the computer and the marks awarded by the instructor," Jean-Luc said hotly.

"You know full well that 4.8% of that is the inconsistency of the instructor," Beverly said. "Remember the P'Tak study. In a triple blind situation where they thought they were adjudicating real disputed marks, the academic standards panel agreed with the expert system nineteen times out of twenty. And that was decades ago! It's only improved since then."

"It's my course, they're my students ... I should mark their work."

"You can train it on a set of your marking," Beverly said. "You've built up a large enough body of it by now, that's for sure. Though if you ask me, the trick to using it is to set really clear criteria for it to assess by."

"And what of creativity? What of the student whose answer is brilliant in some wholly unexpected way? Is the system flexible enough to deal with those?"

"What of the student whose essay catches their instructor on a bad day? What of the student who is the last to be marked, just as midnight is approaching on the marking deadline? You know just as well as I do that the expert system gets you to review its output, including anything where its confidence interval is overbroad. But no one checks your marking anywhere near as carefully."

"Be that as it may," Jean-Luc said, and she knew the next part of this argument well enough to mouth along with him as he said, "Professor Galen never marked using an 'expert system'."

"Professor Galen never gave you anything less than an A-minus." She knew full well that even that had represented a slip in his archaeology grades that Jean-Luc had chastised himself for far more than anyone else would have done. "No wonder you liked his way of doing things."

Beverly's PADD chirruped and her own marking came through. She scrolled through a few sample assignments to double check the algorithm's output - Cadet Y'rrr had scored much higher than she would have expected, but on review it seemed that xie had put in rather more effort than usual on this particular task.

"There, you see? All done!" Jean-Luc barely looked up, so she yawned ostentatiously. "Time for bed for me, I think."

"Sleep well," Jean-Luc said distractedly.

"Don't stay up _too_ late." She bent down and kissed him on the forehead, but he barely responded. "All right, what's so fascinating?" she asked, giving up. "I assume you've moved on from Bracewell if you're this distracted."

"Cadet Gerontius has put together a very cogent argument in favour of scrapping the Prime Directive," Jean-Luc said.

"He probably used an expert system to assemble it from the captain's logs of the Enterprise," Beverly teased. "Any and all Enterprises," she continued, catching his look.

"But don't you see, if I'd used a computer to mark this, I'd have missed out on reading it. And Gerontius would have ended up with a much lower mark."

"You know as well as I do that's exactly the sort of thing that gets flagged for review. So you would still have gotten to have your ego stroked."

"That is not--"

"I'm going to bed, and that's that. And there are things I can do that an expert system _definitely_ isn't flexible enough for..."

"Well," Jean-Luc said, "when you put it like that..."

"What about the sterling example set by Professor Galen?" Beverly said with mock earnestness.

"Professor Galen's wife was wonderful in many ways, but ... well, I can't imagine him he had to contend with a temptress like you," Jean-Luc said.

Beverly stalked off to the bedroom. "Come on, then, _contend_ with me..."

A moment later, she heard the soft voice of the computer say, "Expert marking mode engaged."


End file.
